This is Getting Old (8 page)

All Fall Down

A fall is an unintentional loss of balance causing one to make unexpected contact with the ground or floor.

—
Journal of the American Geriatrics Society
, Vol. 39

T
HE LAST TIME
I
FELL DOWN
, I was at a Zen meditation retreat. About twenty meditators had gathered in a silent circle on a raised deck in the redwoods for our daily work meeting, and I remember thinking as I walked down the path to join the gathering that my shoes were too big. A few steps short of the deck, in full view of the silent watchers, I slipped on the uneven path. I felt my ankle twisting as I went down. It's amazing how much you can think about in the split second between tripping and hitting the ground. On my way down I was already worrying that someone would have to leave the retreat and drive me to Sebastopol to get my ankle x-rayed, but that thought was interrupted when my face slammed into the edge of the deck. A collective wail went up from my audience. It didn't hurt, not exactly—it was too much of a shock. My attention moved from my ankle to my face in a groping attempt to understand what had happened. It was something to do with my mouth. Teeth—Did I
still have my teeth? My hand came away from my lips bloody, but my teeth all seemed to be still attached to my gums.

I uncurled from the ground and looked up into a crowd of faces leaning over the deck railing. “I'm all right,” I said. “I'm really all right.”
How could this be me in a heap on the ground? I'm a tree-climber, a jump-roper, a gravity-defier
. “I feel like such an idiot!” I added. (It's this inability to admit that one is getting old that makes it so hard to get around to installing handrails and buying non-skid rubber bath mats.)

Hands reached out and pulled me up. One fellow meditator, a nurse, led me to wash up. She couldn't find any ice, but she found a cucumber in the fridge and sliced it in half for me to hold against my bloody lip. Soothed by her ministrations, I returned to the group for my work assignment, and that afternoon I performed my duty as a tea server in the meditation hall. A swollen lip doesn't stop a person from pouring tea.

The physical damage was insignificant—some colorful bruises that faded away in a week. I got a lot of kind attention and many offers of arnica. But it was scary to hit the deck like that, face first.

I've taken some other falls since turning sixty, and so I decided to do some Internet research about falling. I found lots of useful bits of advice, like, “Don't stand on chairs, tables, or boxes,” from the Public Health Agency of Canada's Division of Aging and Seniors. Another good suggestion: “Try to land on your buttocks to prevent more serious injuries.” From the Centers for Disease Control came the advice I should have heeded to prevent that last fall: “Wear shoes that give good support and have non-slip soles.”

I learned that about thirteen thousand people age sixty-five and over die every year in the United States as the result of a fall—that's thirty-five a day. Many more are injured and their health is compromised.

Preventing falls in seniors turns out to be an entire field
of medicine unto itself. And I was astonished to learn that for several years in a row, a bill was introduced to Congress called the Keeping Seniors Safe from Falls Act, though it was never passed. Who would vote against such a bill? It must have been too expensive.

In addition to just plain falling, the
fear
of falling is bad for the health, keeping people in their chairs, where their muscles get weaker and weaker. Again, from the Canadian Division of Aging, “Do not let the fear of falling prevent you from being active. Inactivity creates an even greater risk of falling.”

The first of what I think of as my age-related falls happened because I was engaging in behavior that was not age-appropriate. It was a gorgeous summer day, and I was riding on a narrow bike path behind my ten-year-old niece, who was out of sight. I'm not too old to ride a bike, but I felt suddenly compelled to ride “no hands” as I used to do when I was a girl of ten.
You're only as old as you feel!
Aren't they always telling you that? The carefree breeze caressed my hair and the warblers seemed to be singing my praises from the bushes, until my wheel slipped on some gravel at a curve in the path and down I went, skinning my knees, hands, and elbows. Wheeling my bike, I limped to where my niece waited for me at a fork in the path. “My God! What happened to you?” she exclaimed.

“Pride goeth before a fall,” I told her. I have given up riding “no hands” for the rest of my life—one more age-related loss. At least this one is easy to live with.

The truth is, my balance is bad. In my yoga class, I stand near the wall for the crane pose and surreptitiously touch it with a knee or an elbow, as no self-respecting crane would ever do. My yoga teacher has told me you can improve your balance with practice. So I've adopted a daily practice. Every morning, while I use my electric toothbrush, which turns itself off after exactly two minutes, I stand on one foot. On the even dates I stand on the right foot and on the odd dates I stand on the left. The calf
muscles of the standing foot burn. At first I couldn't make it through two minutes, but now I can.

As I get older the ground seems to get farther and farther away, and it takes longer for my brain to get the signals to my feet, and vice versa. Sometimes when I first get out of bed in the morning I stumble against the door frame on my way to the bathroom. My body used to take care of ordinary things like walking on its own, without adult supervision; now I have to think about picking up my feet.

I realize that a cane is not just to support weak joints and muscles—it helps you balance. I'm not there yet, though I do use hiking poles, and there's no loss of pride in that because even young and athletic people use them. I have a cane of my grandfather's in the attic, waiting for me. It's made of some kind of bone. And after canes come walkers.

Speaking of walkers, I've been watching a friend's ten-month-old learn to walk. She holds onto the coffee table and walks herself along its edge, and then she takes the great plunge, lets go, and steps out across space, two full steps to the edge of the sofa! Triumph! As for me, I'm moving in the opposite direction. Someday the people in the room may clap for me, too, as I let go of the edge of the kitchen table and take the bold step across space to the kitchen counter.

My friend's daughter falls down frequently in the process of learning to walk, and she bounces back up on her rubber skeleton. Sometimes she cries, but it never lasts long. When you are over sixty and the ground spins up into your face, it's a different story, especially when your bones are getting porous, as mine are.

While staying in a friend's rustic cabin, I got up in the middle of the night to use the outhouse. Returning to bed in the moonless, nightlight-less dark, I tripped and fell against a wooden platform and, as I later learned, broke two ribs. The crash awoke the young woman sleeping at the other end of the loft, who kindly asked what she could do to help, but I could
think of nothing, and I since I had had the good fortune to fall
after
visiting the outhouse, I went back to bed, took an aspirin, and slept until morning.

If you're going to break bones, ribs are the best bones to break. For a few weeks, it hurt to cough or laugh, but it's amazing how well the body works. I just went on with my life, trying not to cough, and after a while my ribs weren't broken anymore. How do they know how to fix themselves? When my car gets a dent, it keeps a dent.

After my mother's death, my siblings and I packed up her belongings in her apartment in Chicago. When we were done, I said good-bye to my sister, who waited for the movers among boxes in the empty, echoing living room, and I left the apartment for the last time, to head back home to California. It was a bitter winter day as I trundled my way along the sidewalk with suitcase and tote bag. When I was half a block from the bus stop, I saw a bus approaching and I began to run. I slipped and fell on the icy sidewalk and papers and books went flying out of my tote bag. My hands were badly scraped and bloody, and one knee was skinned under my torn pants. As I struggled to my feet, I saw the bus pull away.

Two women coming along the sidewalk caught up with me—angels of kindness. “Are you all right? Can we help you?” One brushed the leaves off my back, and the other picked up my papers.

“I'm OK,” I said. The part of me that wasn't OK was invisible—it had to do with leaving my mother's apartment behind for the last time. It had to do with the fact that she was dead. She'd taken her final fall; we had returned her ashes to the ground.

I thanked the women and walked to the bus stop, just as another bus pulled up. I got on, fumbled for my money with my bloody hands, and sat down in disarray. I must have looked pretty bad to the people on the bus, but once I was settled for the
long ride to the airport, I wiped the blood off my hands with a handkerchief I'd taken from my mother's top dresser drawer.

A happier fall took place on my own front steps. Near the bottom, I unaccountably stepped off into the air when there was still one more step to go, and I fell hard on the concrete sidewalk. I rolled onto my back, feeling a fire burning in my ankle. It was a quiet morning in the neighborhood. No one was around. Nothing seemed to be broken. I lay there, stopped in my tracks on the way to the grocery store, looking up at the clear sky and the diagonal of the roofline jutting into it. I admired the top of the chimney. Time stopped, and I rested like a kindergartener at naptime. I had fallen not just down the steps but through a hole in the earth to a country without grocery stores, beyond the reach of gravity. I couldn't fall any farther. When the burning in my ankle subsided and I got up, relinquishing the moment of peace, I found that I could walk fine.

But there are other ways to find a peaceful moment. One of the items on all the lists of how to prevent falls is: “Have handrails installed on all staircases,” and after that fall I finally got around to installing a handrail on the front steps. I'd been putting it off—could there really be someone living at my address who needs a handrail?—but now the smooth round wood feels good in my hand. It's almost as satisfying as sliding down the banister.

Senior Moment, Wonderful Moment

I
CALLED MY FRIEND
Cornelia, a fellow grandmother, to ask if I could borrow a crib for my granddaughter's upcoming visit. When she answered the phone, I said, “Hi, Cornelia—it's Sue,” and then my mind went blank. I paused, hopefully, but no more words came out of my mouth.

“Morning,” she said. “What's up?”

She was a good enough friend that I didn't have to fake it, but still, it was unsettling. “Ummm,” I said, waiting for the old neurons to start firing up again. I asked myself if it had to do with our weekly walking date. No-o-o . . . Was it about her son's article on stream conservation? No-o-o . . . Out the window a squirrel was running along the porch railing with a walnut in his mouth. “I'm having a senior moment,” I said finally. “Do
you
happen to know why I called?”

She laughed. “You must have known that I have some plums to give you, from my tree.” The squirrel was now sitting on the railing, peeling the outer shell off the walnut and spitting it on the ground. I'd never noticed before how the long fur of their tails waves back and forth like grass when they flick them.

By the time I went over to Cornelia's house to pick up the plums, I had remembered about the crib and I got that, too.

The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh helps me appreciate my senior moments. In his book,
Present Moment, Wonderful Moment
, he writes, “The real miracle is to be awake in the present moment.” I'm confident he would agree that a senior moment, a moment of forgetting what day it is or where you are going, can be a moment of deep understanding.

For example, standing in the kitchen wondering why I have a pair of scissors in my hand, I notice the sunlight glinting off its metal blades and dancing on the wall, and I repeat Nhat Hanh's sentence to myself: “The real miracle is to be awake in the present moment!” Younger people can also experience such transcendent moments of deep immersion in the infinite present, but they have to go to much greater lengths to do so, meditating for days at a time, for example, or hang gliding. I have only to carry a pair of scissors from one room to another.